When Among Crows (Curse Bearer, #1)

by Veronica Roth

Kiedy wejdziesz między wrony musisz krakać tak jak one.* —Polish saying * When among crows, you must caw as one.

there’s nothing magic likes better than the great hollow of a debt. And so magic nestled here, heedless of what the adherents of this particular religion would think of it.

She’s a small, slight woman with the sly smile of a fox and hoop earrings the size of his fist. That she’s a zmora is more obvious for her than it is for the bartender—there’s too much time in her eyes.

“A nightly buffet, laid for creatures who feast on human fear? Yes. I know.” “You make us sound so uncultured.” She gestures to the curtains. “Playing in that room is the movie Alien. 1979. Ridley Scott. A symphony of tension, rising to shock, disgust, horror. Mellowing to a tremulous kind of anxiety. For those zmory with far more delicate palates than most—for the rest, we offer a slasher movie every Wednesday. Quick, hot scares, like a plate of french fries.” She touches her hand to her belly. “Delicious. But not particularly refined.”

“I know human men,” she says. “I have made their worst nightmares come to life around them. I have made them weep. I know what happens when they don’t get what they want from us.”

He asks, “What will it take to convince you that I mean no harm?” “There’s nothing you can say or do that will convince me of that,” Klara says. “Men always mean harm. The question is simply ‘when’.”

The man reaches behind him and digs his fingers into the skin at the back of his neck. Then he yanks both hands up in one strong motion, and a bone-white blade pulls free of his flesh, his blood still running down the hilt. He may have split his soul to make the weapon, but he still has to pay for it in pain every time he wants to fight with it.

“But you still seem painfully ordinary.” “I don’t find it painful to be ordinary.”

If not for her eyes, she would resemble a wealthy woman from another time—but her eyes. They’re bright yellow and piercing as a shriek. They focus on him from the moment he steps into the room, and he feels them like heat.

He can feel Dymitr’s eyes on him, but he pretends not to notice. This intimacy is flowing too fast, too much, and if Niko doesn’t stop himself, he’ll drink it all down at once until there’s nothing left.

“Is this what you want from me?” he says. “To change?” She crouches in front of him, and reaches for his hand. He gives it to her, and holds on. “I want you to live,” she says. “I want you to try.”

But there is something different about him, too. Something sharper, and wilder, like a fox that wanders into a suburban neighborhood in search of food—capable at any moment of ferocity.

“You expected death, and pain, and a life of suffering. You came to me for those things, thinking they would be your penance.”

A longsword made of bone, bright white with a gilded hilt. It was made by magic, but not a magic Baba Jaga understands or respects—a magic that uses pain as currency, the magic of monster-hunting Knights of the Holy Order. She can feel the agony that brought it into being every time she walks past it, like a sour taste in her mouth, like an echo of a scream.

Knights carving wounds into their own flesh to curse her kind with bloodthirsty crows or flesh-hungry wolves. Knights who take every powerful symbol they find to twist it and warp it into their own. Knights who crave death, and seek it, and cling to it like an oath.

“You Eastern Europeans always have this aura of profound gloom, you know that?” John waves at Dymitr’s face. “Or maybe Americans are just obnoxiously chipper. That world-famous optimism, right? Not so much to be optimistic about these days, of course—” Though Dymitr didn’t ask, John launches into a summary of the situation across the Midwest.